Moorpark College is the best community college in California, according to a new report released by WalletHub.
The study conducted by the personal finance website ranked community colleges nation-wide. It placed Moorpark number one in the state, 13th nationally, and eighth place in terms of students successfully obtaining their desired career outcomes.
“Each of you has every reason to be proud of the contribution you make to our reputation for excellence,” said President Luis Sanchez in an email to Moorpark faculty and staff. “Thank you for your relentless dedication to our college and our students.”
WalletHub is a personal finance website that offers tips and training to improve one’s financial literacy as well as free personal finance tools such as credit reports, credit scores, and credit monitoring. The site also conducts research on topics related to personal finance such as the relationship between car insurance premiums and credit scores.
WalletHub’s analysts compared 821 community colleges focusing on three main categories: cost and financing, education outcomes, and career outcomes. Within those categories they analyzed 12 relevant metrics such as cost of in-state tuition, faculty salary, first-year retention rate, and student to faculty ratio.
These metrics were all weighted, given a certain amount of points based on their perceived value by WalletHub’s analysts and then used to calculate each school’s final score. The schools were then ranked based on these final scores.
In their analysis, WalletHub found the ratio of starting salary for graduates to cost of education, or return on educational investment, to be the most valuable metric worth 22.22 points. The least valuable metric was transfer-out rate at 3.7 points. Most of the other 10 metrics were weighted with school spending efficiency at 5.56 points and graduation rate at 7.41 points.
Joshua David, 20-year-old engineering major, hadn’t heard about the report, but wasn’t very surprised.
“I knew we were up there,” said David. “I love it here and the campus is beautiful.”
According to WalletHub’s findings, the second best community college in California is Coastline Community College, with Barstow Community College third in California and just a few places behind Coastline nationally.
